Glastonbury

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.com is the only free-to-play social casino and sports book where you can spin the reels, drop parlays, chase the spread, and hit up live blackjack without leaving your couch.

Slots, sports, original games, Legends has it all.

Win real prizes and redeem instantly straight to your bank.

Legends is a free-to-play social casino void prohibitive.

Must be 18 plus p response.

We visit Legends.com for full details.

Get in the game now and score a 50 bonus on your first purchase only at legends with a z.com with the wealth front cash account you can earn four percent annual percentage yield from partner banks on your cash until you're ready to invest the cash account grows your money with no account maintenance fees and free instant withdrawals whenever you need it money works better here go to wealthfront.com to start saving and investing today Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC member Fenra SIPC.

Wealthfront is not a bank.

The APY on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum.

Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY.

This is a download from the BBC.

To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4.

Ladies and gentlemen, would you please, for Glastonbury 2013, put your hands together, go absolutely wild with applause for Robin Inks, Brian Cox, and the Infinite Monkey Gang!

So basically what happened was we did Glastonbury two years ago and they asked us to do it again and Brian said well if we're doing Glastonbury, why don't we do something simple and gentle about poetry or why stars are pretty?

And I said, no, we have got an audience of people who will be quite confused by this stage of the festival.

Quantum cosmology is the only idea and you are the perfect audience for quantum cosmology because I believe you are displaying quantum behaviour.

Many of you are both dead and alive.

You are here and you are not here.

You are indeed all in superpositions.

Yes, today we'll be looking at quantum cosmology.

Are time and space, as Einstein envisaged, a smooth fabric with the future as real as the past?

Or does quantum theory save us from deterministic drudgery?

Are there really an infinite number of parallel universes or is this it?

What happens inside a black hole?

Was there anything before the Big Bang?

Is there a possibility that I might one day meet another me from another world where I am shorter, without my trademark, good looks and great hair and with no real understanding of particle physics?

How am I that?

Am I the other Brian Cox?

Have I come here to this world to kill him in some kind of Philip K.

Dick nightmare?

So To help us explain, and when I say us, I do not include me, because I have no idea, we were actually up last night talking about these ideas, and they are fantastically bamboozling.

Our first guest is a professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London, where she specializes in quantum cosmology.

She has never been to the Glassmanry Festival before, but as someone who's studied many worlds' interpretations, she also knows that she has been to every single Glasnery Festival before,

sometimes as a human, sometimes as a sentient droplet of pear juice.

She is someone dealing with very confusing worlds.

It is Faye Dauker.

Our next guest works on the phenomenology of elementary particle physics, and trying to say phenomenology without thinking about the Muppets is difficult.

Try it, phenomenology.

Thank you.

He's also a co-writer of books with a popular TV scientist, such as Y does equal to MC squared in the quantum universe.

It is Professor Jeff Forshaw.

And

like so many of our regular guests, Professor Richard Dawkins, Sir Paul Nurse, and the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, today one of our guests is also a former podium dancer like them.

Richard Dawkins, of course, used to be a podium dancer at the Heather Nightclub until a falling out of their refusal to change its name to a finite existence followed by an inevitable death without any sense of being.

Nightclub.

He's a regular on I Got Newsfew, The Now Show, and sometimes also goes under the name Giles Wembley Hogg, and he is Marcus Brigstar.

And our final guest is a musician who we had to have on because she titled her albums Eye to the Telescope and Crescent Moon and became a musician despite being brought up in a house with only one album in it.

But it was satirist and scientist Tom Lira, so that's a good start.

You might hear more of that later.

It is the great KT Tunstall, and this is our panel.

Now, I thought we'd start, because we have two of the most eminent professors in the UK here, Professor Fay Dowka, Professor Jeff Forshaw, I thought we'd start by getting a feel for what quantum cosmology is and the ideas behind it.

So, Marcus Bridstock, quickly, can you explain quantum cosmology in a minute?

In a minute, yes, I certainly can.

Is that with deviation, repetition, and hesitation?

And can the benefit of the doubt go to anybody but me?

Yes, I can explain it perfectly simply.

If you go to the top of the the Glastonbury Festival, by top I mean the highest point here,

you reach the greenfields and then you can look down on the entire Glastonbury Festival.

And that, in a way, is probably the best metaphor in this short amount of time that I can think of to explain the thing that you asked me about.

And another thing that is worth remembering is that on the way back from there, you can pass through what's known as the healing fields, or what I like to call the field of lies.

They're very sweet lies.

They're lovely.

They don't mean any ill, but it is simply a field of lies.

Ah, I see you're wearing spectacles.

Rub these on them.

What?

You can't fix my eyesight like that.

Lovely people, though.

Katie, you were actually, your father was a physicist.

You were brought up in a house there where...

You were there entirely vicariously.

You, my father.

So what was it, you know, in terms of your experience with your father trying to explain some of these kind of incredible ideas?

Well, my dad loved his job, so he was just in the lab all the time.

But he kind of played games with me and my brothers when we were little.

And his favourite one was that liquid nitrogen came in a big canister on a kind of dolly trolley.

And he'd take the liquid nitrogen off, put me and my brother on the trolley, slish the liquid nitrogen down the corridor,

then put me and my brother on the trolley and go, Don't touch,

and push us down the corridor.

And it was amazing.

And social services never found out about it.

So Faye, we've got these two words, quantum cosmology.

So if you could start by just describing what cosmology is as a subject.

Cosmology is the study of the whole universe all at once.

So that does indeed include all of Glastonbury, everyone in this tent, absolutely everything.

That's cosmology.

But that's incredibly difficult.

We couldn't possibly, in practice, explain everything all at once.

So what we do in cosmology is we ask questions about the largest scales in the universe that we can see.

So when we look out in the universe, we see that our sun is just one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy.

And each galaxy our galaxy is only one of a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe.

The most important and interesting thing that we see when we look out and we see all these galaxies is that they are moving away from us.

The universe itself is expanding and it is expanding at a tremendous rate.

And we know that, therefore, in the past, the universe must have been a lot smaller than it is now.

Sorry, I have a question.

Is the universe likely to keep on expanding and expanding, or is it like you, Kip, and we hope that that's sort of a blitz?

we don't know it sort of gets bigger for a bit and then it and then people go that's just silly

we don't know the answer to that question completely but on the evidence that we have right now the universe is i the expansion of the universe the its rate is actually increasing so the rate of expansion is accelerating and if that continues then it will it will expand forever.

We are living in a Farage universe is what you mean.

Farage.

If you're that anti-European, it's Farage, not Farage.

Farage.

Farage as in Garage.

Jeff, so when we're...

Why do we need quantum ideas in terms of why do you need those ideas in explaining why is classical, why is classical ideas of physics not enough to explain the basic ideas of this universe, of our universe?

Well, in large part, classical ideas are okay.

You know, when you're building bridges, you don't need to know about quantum physics.

But to understand how atoms work, then it's absolutely mandatory.

To understand how the tiny particles which make up all of the things in the universe, as far as we can tell, everything in the universe is made up of tiny particles, things like electrons, then

to understand how those particles behave, we have to introduce these new laws, these laws of quantum physics.

And these laws are characterized by the fact that they are ridiculous.

They're a complete affront to common sense.

So they have...

So

you would be thinking about how an electron is behaving in the vicinity of a proton.

That's a hydrogen atom.

And the correct way to describe the electron in the vicinity of the proton is to suppose that that electron is in several different places at the same time.

And getting us to embrace ideas like particles, a single particle can be in two places at once, is about as mind-blowing as it gets.

And the cosmology project is really audacious.

As Faye was saying, this is an attempt to describe the entirety of the universe starting out at the very beginning.

And it's so audacious that we're pretty certain that we can understand the evolution of the universe from a point when all of those billions and billions of stars were compressed into a volume about the size of a beach ball.

So all of that at the size of a beach ball.

From there on to the present day, we're reasonably confident that we actually understand the physics.

Quantum effects come in

before then, earlier on.

We come across quantum physics in cosmology when we get to the very early universe,

much smaller than a second,

tiny, tiny fractions of a second.

That's been quite different.

It was beautifully explained.

Can I just say what is lovely is there's a wonderful silence in the audience, and I know that all of them have at least grasped that at one point the universe was a beach ball.

And then there's kind of like, we know that, we know that for certain.

Can I just check?

That time is in, I mean, what time frame are we talking about from the Big Bang to the universe being the size of a beach ball?

It's something like 10 to the minus 25 seconds.

Katie,

to summarise that, we have what

billions, 350 billion or so galaxies in the observable universe, large galaxies, compressed into the size of a beach ball.

And the claim, Jeff's claim, the claim of modern physics is we understand things pretty well from that point.

The rest of this program is talking about the universe before it got as big as a beach ball.

What do you think?

Well.

What fascinates me, the very little that I know about quantum mechanics and quantum physics, is that it basically seems to be

that very little things don't necessarily like being looked at.

And they sometimes behave a bit naughtily.

When you look at them, you made them cheeky but shy particles.

There was actually, there was an idea, it used to be an idea called panpsychism, which was that even the smallest particles actually had consciousness, right?

Which I know know is one of your folks.

A lot.

No, but then I'm not.

I love it.

I liked that idea until I then imagined the Large Hadron Collider, and it became really melancholy, just where we're going round and round and round.

Then it's the end.

All this used to be fields.

I bet there's a really keen particle at CERN, though, going, isn't it fast, though?

You know, fast.

The Jeremy Clarkson of particles going,

I went round the collider, okay?

Let's break it again.

I'm not having, this is the rational tense.

I'm not having this kind of conversation in the rational tent.

You're looking for the left field, Brian.

This is a tent full of nonsense.

But that is, I mean, Katie, you've said in an interview recently, you actually, when you were writing your new album, you were thinking very specifically about quantum ideas and that you did actually.

I wouldn't say very specifically, but I think, but with hindsight, which is a good thing in quantum physics,

that I wrote the first half of my album and I was concentrating on sort of smaller things and within a few months there was a really weird psychic quality to the first half of the record where the songs that I'd written were incredibly informative of things that had happened afterwards and things that I couldn't have predicted happening.

And Howe Gelp, who I made the record with, is a real firm believer also in the subconscious having

very often a stronger effect on the way that you can think than your conscious mind, that there's something at play that is of your nature, that you're not actually in control of, and that is working on a more mysterious level than your conscious brain is.

And uh the thing that I think for me, knowing very little about this, is the information, which might be completely wrong, that our brains are taking in 400 billion

pieces of information a second and yet we're actually only capable of processing two thousand two thousand

2,000 or something.

So our brains are choosing the reality that we're experiencing.

And so, you know.

What I think Jeff was suggesting, so in particle physics, which is what both myself and Jeff do,

there seems to be no real conceptual problem in thinking about an electron doing multiple things at once around a proton, or at least it doesn't make us particularly uncomfortable.

But when we move on to the universe and building a quantum picture, a quantum theory of the universe, are we really saying that we can legitimately think of multiple universes with multiple things happening?

Or is that a signal that we don't understand physics correctly when we talk about quantum cosmology?

There's controversy on exactly that question.

Quantum mechanics was invented, it was discovered to describe small things.

And in trying to apply it to the whole universe, we have to do something that quantum mechanics isn't set up to do.

So the rules of quantum mechanics tell you how to make predictions about observations and measurements that you make on the quantum system.

And as you say, when the quantum system is an electron, then you're not too bothered about exactly what that electron is doing.

You can use fuzzy language and say, well, it maybe it's in lots of places all at the same time, maybe it's here and here at the same time.

When it's just an electron, that's not too bothersome.

But when you're talking about the whole universe, there's nothing outside the universe to measure or observe us in the universe.

We, we're all part of the universe, and we are supposed to be part of the quantum system when we do quantum cosmology.

And the rules of quantum mechanics are just not set up for that situation.

They're not set up to tell us what's really going on in a quantum system.

And there's just different points of view in the scientific community amongst physicists about how to describe what's really going on in a quantum system.

Quantum physicists, I'm interested in the multiverse theory.

Do serious quantum physicists, and I imagine most of you are fairly serious, spend time thinking a lot about the multiverse thing?

Because it strikes me that it's a sort of a campfire greenfields bit of nitrous discussion.

Yeah, you know, there could be a you and me over there.

But it's sort of considering it, does it have any practical effect on our understanding of the this reality?

Have you seen sliding doors?

Did you cry?

The answer to that is yes.

There are lots of serious physicists who take seriously the idea that there are multiple universes.

It's very hard to test it, so

they get criticized a lot for doing stuff which is not really physics because it's

you know they need to think of a good way of testing that idea, a way of doing an experiment that would indicate that they're not just crazy.

And so far, there have not been any experiments like that.

The kind of test that we would like to do would be:

if you imagine getting out of bed in the morning, you could get out of bed on the left or on the right.

So there are two versions of...

You can kind of roll out of the sleeping bag to the left or to the right and then go about your business.

And then at some point in the future, you make some decision or other.

And

the question of whether or not, did you actually get out, is there a universe where you got out on the left and one where you got out on the right?

And if so, do they make a difference to your future?

That's the kind of experiment that people are trying to do with things, not people, but much smaller objects.

Physicists for years have been trying to get out of bed and realizing that the safest thing to do is to remain in it.

Faye, so Jeff's describing this interpretation of quantum theory as applied to a universe in which there really are multiple, actually infinite number of instances of all of us all interfering together, an infinite number of universes.

Is that, and Jeff has said that people take that seriously.

What's your view on that kind of interpretation?

So I don't take that point of view.

There are people who take that seriously.

We're all struggling to understand what it means for the whole universe to be a quantum system.

And this is one direction that people have taken that hypothesis in.

I don't think that.

I I think there's just one instance of the universe.

There aren't multiple copies of us, there's just us.

But we still have to understand how to describe ourselves quantum mechanically.

And that's work in progress as far as I'm concerned.

The answer isn't, we don't know.

We're doing research to figure out what it means for us to be quantum systems.

And in doing quantum cosmology, that's one of the challenges, to understand what it means for the universe to be a quantum system, to describe the universe in fully quantum terms

without having to mention or

pay regard to or assume that there's something outside the universe looking at us.

So in ourselves, being quantum systems, we want to be able to describe that.

And the second challenge in quantum cosmology is that we need to be able to understand what it means for space-time itself to be quantum.

So in cosmology, as Jeff was describing, there are two things.

There's the matter in the universe, and we know that's quantum.

As Jeff was saying, we have very good quantum theories to describe matter, which we test to supreme and beautiful accuracy in experiments like at the LHC.

But there's also space-time.

And according to general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity, space-time is itself a thing.

It's just as real and material as the matter that this table is made of.

And space-time bends, it warps, it ripples, it ris it interacts with the matter.

So the matter tells the space-time how to ripple, how to warp, and the space-time tells the matter how to move.

And because the matter is quantum, we know that there must be quantum fluctuations in space-time itself.

But throughout most of the history of the universe, we can assume that those fluctuations are small enough, we can just ignore them.

However, at the Big Bang, at that moment,

the quantum fluctuations in space-time are so big we can't ignore them anymore.

General relativity itself breaks down, and we need a quantum theory of gravity.

We need to know what the quantum structure of space-time is.

And we're talking about, what, 10 to the minus 42 seconds after the Big Bang now,

so that is, for the drinkers, a million, million, million, million, million, million millionths of a second after the Big Bang.

That's what's worrying us at the moment.

The physics before that time.

Physics before that time.

And many scientists working on this problem of finding a quantum theory of space-time or a quantum theory of gravity, because according to general relativity, gravity is a manifestation of the curvature and warpage of space-time.

Many people working on this problem think that at that time, or before that

10 to the minus 42 seconds after the Big Bang, space-time ceases to be a smooth and continuous fabric, but is better described as something which is granular and atomic.

I mean, I don't mean it's made of the same atoms that tables and chairs are made of, but it's made of individual grains, individual pixels, if you like.

And that's a

general idea that many people are pursuing.

And just to underline how strange that is, you're talking about time here.

So time itself.

and space together as space-time being granular and built up out of so indivisible units of time.

Exactly.

So, what you experience as the passage of time is, or could be, according to these ideas, it could be the coming into being of these individual grains of time.

Sorry, I've got another question because we've had

the universe was lumpy

and time granular.

Are these words that you're using to comfort us

the simple the tired and the stoned

or is that are those like are those convenient descriptions for things that are massively complicated or are they are they genuinely how you see it's little tiny pixels particles granular and that and that the the beach ball of everything was lumpy

it was lumpy that's a technical

that's a tech that's science there it does make you feel better about your sleeping bag on a Sunday yeah it is lumpy and granular but in many ways isn't that the beginning of a universe in itself?

My mattress is simply full of everything and time.

Katie, what do you...

I mean, Richard Feimer, the great physicist, he once said, yeah, anyone who says they understand quantum physics doesn't understand quantum physics, which is obviously a tremendous relief for Marcus and me.

And I wonder how...

What do you feel for you as someone, again, who's not a scientist, but brought up in a scientific family?

What are the hardest problems?

What is the point where you go, now this bit is too counter-instinctive?

This is...

I mean, mean, my poor dad used to come home from work and he'd go, look at my graph.

And we'd go, shut up, dad.

Sit down, have your dinner.

And so I do wonder whether are,

and no disrespect to any scientists who are here, but is there some things that human beings cannot yet understand?

And obviously, people who are specialists in this field

are able to grasp it using language that is used in a way that we don't use it, granular, lumpy.

But

there's parts of it that I think you can grasp onto, something like entanglement, where you've got two particles, they're separated by a vast distance, you do something to one of them, and the exact same thing happens to another one.

And

that's a very kind of human,

fantastically human thing to grab onto.

The fact that our ideas of time travel or

you know, it's impossible that that's kind of an instruction that's going that distance it has to be something that's happening beyond someone someone like mine grasp but that is surely proof of some sort of subatomic connectivity so you know molecular connectivity that does apply to us it's what we're made of and it and it surely informs us that there's connection between things in this universe that we don't understand and that when you do separate things from each other it doesn't work that the the universe isn't isn't necessarily working as a machine, it's an organism.

It's interesting.

Casey raises a point there about

perhaps the limits of human understanding.

I mean, we're assuming that we should be able to comprehend and understand the universe as it was, as you said, when it's millions and millions of times smaller than a beach ball, in fact.

And the observable universe is the tiny microscopic subatomic thing.

Is there any reason to have confidence that we can actually begin to understand and answer these questions?

Or could it be that we just reach a limit?

Yeah.

Well, what should be said first of all is that, I mean, it sounds very grand and as though there's some attempt to explain lots of things, but actually, everything that Faye and I have been talking about is characterized in large part by its simplicity and the fact that, for example, that nascent beach ball universe was actually less complicated than understanding what happens when you kick a bucket of water.

The physics of the universe when it was very young was remarkably, as far as we understand it, remarkably simple.

Likewise, the stuff that's going on at CERN involves taking

one or two particles and just banging them into each other.

The rules are straightforward, and we can apply the rules so we can understand how these little particles are behaving.

Put that way, it doesn't sound very ambitious.

So, one thing that fundamental science is not capable of doing is explaining complicated phenomena, complicated things, how complicated things behave.

That's another branch of science which is growing in interest, the study of complicated systems.

So, this fundamental physics, it's all about getting our basic ideas right about what the fundamental laws are that are in play in the universe.

It's a far cry from understanding those fundamental laws.

It's a long way from, we can have the fundamental laws, but we still won't be able to understand a large fraction of the things that happen in the universe, and especially those characterized by complicated things, things with lots of atoms in them, for example.

So it's a bit like knowing the rules of chess.

You can know the rules of chess, but that doesn't mean that you can play chess like Garry Kasparov.

So it might sound sometimes like it's a very ambitious program, and in some ways it is, but it's not.

In other ways, it's extremely simple and limited in its scope.

Was quantum cosmology, did this happen during a kind of physicist's beach holiday?

Because we've got beach balls, buckets of water, granular, and it, I mean, do you ever get worried that with some of these ideas that will there be a point, like we just said about Feynman, you know, anyone who says they understand quantum physics doesn't understand quantum physics, do you ever have moments of doubt of going, what if we've gone down entirely the wrong path?

What if it does turn up?

What if there is a moment of discovery where suddenly you go, wow, this could not, or do you feel a level of confidence with it?

Well,

I mean, it would be...

It would be wrong to say that I would be really happy if it turned out that everything that I've been doing was totally wrong.

But there's a side of me that

would welcome that in that it there's a lot of stuff that I don't understand, and that's what allows me to get excited about carrying on doing physics.

I want to understand

how things work.

And

the understanding that we've got now of how tiny particles behave, these quantum rules, which by the way are not esoteric.

I mean, they're the rules that determine how silicon chips work and how the micro, the transistors that are inside of them, present in their billions, how they behave and

so these laws are really tangible.

You couldn't design a computer without them.

But

I've lost my train.

What was

it?

Glastonbury!

That's what you do.

Is there ever a word, you know, you have Newtonian laws that work up to a point, and then you go.

So is there any moment where you think, will there be another discovery which will turn much of this?

Yeah, so the fact that

we can understand so much with so little because that's the characteristic feature of what we've got we've not got many equations that we write down It's not like a big encyclopedia that we need just a few equations describe so much of the universe it really feels like we've got some measure of understanding It's hard to imagine something taking that away from us You know we we it works and is useful to people it's it so any new ideas may completely upturn the way that we think about the fundamentals, but they're not going to change the the stuff that we've got already.

It's a bit like when quantum physics came along, it completely overturned everything that Isaac Newton had done fundamentally, but it didn't, all the bridges didn't suddenly fall down when we discovered quantum physics.

So we get better and better at understanding nature, and surely we don't understand it all yet.

There's more, and that's that that in that it's in that sense that it's exciting.

So

you're quite a young man.

What do you think you'll do once you've, you know, once you've solved it?

Like after this, once you've got it all and someone's noted it down and that,

what next for you?

I've got two young kids, so

you buggered them.

Faye, I wanted to.

Jeff said that about new ideas, overturning old ideas.

This happens in physics from time to time.

But you spoke about this idea of space-time itself being built up, in a sense, these grains of space-time being constructed.

As though the idea that the future is not yet there, that it has to be constructed, is a new idea and a challenging idea in physics.

So,

what is the current paradigm?

Because I think it would seem to many people that the idea the future is yet to be built seems to be a natural idea.

So, our best theory

that deals with the question of the nature of time is general relativity.

That's Einstein's theory of gravity.

It's a theory of space-time.

And the amazing thing about this theory is that it tells us that there's no such thing as a global universal moment of now.

That is the same for us here, for me, for you, for everyone in the rest of the site, for people in Sydney and Australia, for people on Mars, for aliens elsewhere on the universe.

There's no such thing as now

that covers the whole universe.

That's simply an unphysical thing to think.

And

the way that Einstein described that is he said there's no, that there's relativity of simultaneity.

So we can all say that together, but maybe I won't make you say it.

So there's no such thing as there being simultaneous events everywhere in the universe that we can all agree are now.

And because there's a live 8 didn't work very well for me.

And because there's no now,

that means that the now is what divides the past from the future.

So because there's no global now, there can't be any difference between events that in the past and events in the future.

They must be just as real as each other, because now is what divides them.

So if there's no now, there's no distinction between past and future.

And so people have have taken this and and uh to its limit and said, well, that means that the universe must exist as a block.

Or everything that has happened, everything that will happen,

all ex all those things exist in a timeless way laid out once and for all in this block.

And that's called, it is called, in fact, the block universe point of view.

And people who believe that are called blockheads.

This is great because Robin can ask the question that he's tried to ask for eight series of monkey cage.

He sits there and he wants to ask the question, but what about free will?

No, I've never

seen

free will.

If free will's an illusion, who cares?

He asks it all the time.

It gets edited out of every show that we do.

Go on, ask it.

I'm not introduced.

Do you want to find out?

I'm going to find out.

No, I'm not going to ask him, Robin.

I'll tell you what, I'll ask me a question.

Thank you very much.

Like working with Eddie Large.

So it's...

Couldn't it be true that free will's an illusion?

Yes, but only if you.

That's all I needed.

But this is one of the things that I do find interest, we talked before as well about quantum ideas being possibly kind of a gateway to Boulder Dash.

Like, you know, there are, you were saying, Mark, as you were up in the healing fields, and

is there a possibility, you know, a problem where you have people go, well, ESP can be explained because the mind, a thing, quantum behavior.

Well, you can, can't you, with a small amount of information but some big sounding words, you can convince a lot of people of

some things that certainly aren't true.

I've built a

fairly successful stand-up career on precisely that.

But just to come back, Vay, to the idea that there isn't a now,

that's one of those things you hear.

I've heard you say that at times, I thought, right, yes, Google, she knows what she's talking about, so that must be true.

And then I thought, no, that makes no sense to me at all.

I don't get that.

Is that because,

as you were saying before, time is bent and

I don't understand.

I can't even frame a question to explain the way in which I don't understand.

That's just going to be edited perfectly, Ted.

Is it because time is bent?

Thank you.

The key word is universal, universal no.

So

my no exists, right?

I can talk about something,

no for me, but some things that are in my future will be in somebody else's past.

So there's a blurring of the no when we start talking about

everything that's happening in the universe, things that happen in far away or close by.

the order of things can can be dependent on who is doing the

who's ordering the events.

Obviously this is limited to to human or maybe just animal experience, this idea of a now, because a now is a thing that that we experience.

But our nows, your now and my now, and the now of a man perhaps called now in in Thailand,

I don't know what sort of names they use and I think that might have been racist, I'm not sure.

It's perfect balance.

Earlier, you mentioned you kip a name.

Now I'm racist.

So it's a good balancing.

But all of those nows could happen all at once in the same now, could they not?

Not according to general relativity.

Those nows they can't be joined up into a global now that's physical, that has any physical relevance.

But what Jeff said is right.

There are personal, individual nows which we experience.

So the temporality temporality of our experience, I think, is real, but it's not in general relativity.

That's the thing.

Our current science doesn't contain any notion of the physicality of our temporal experience, the fact that we experience time passing.

We don't feel that we exist once and for all.

We feel that there is something special about now.

And the idea, one of the ideas that's coming out of this

proposal, this hypothesis that space-time is fundamentally granular, is that there's now something to hang physically this experience, this temporality of our experience onto, and it is the process of the coming into being of these space-time grains.

That birth of these new atoms of space-time is something that we can hang on, hang our individual, personal, local experience of the passage of time onto.

Am I sometimes on the now show,

or is that an illusion?

You're just on it on your own, Marcus.

That's all.

It so often feels that way.

Katie, do you?

We were talking before about

you've been watching some documentaries about quantum physics and quantum ideas.

And when you, having been brought up in a scientific household, how do you try and sieve the kind of things you think?

Well, I think that may well be a scientific idea, and I think that might be possibly the work of a Charlotten Bamboosa with a new book to sell.

You usually look at what the person's wearing.

And I I always basically, if there's excessive shaping of the beard, you usually don't trust them.

No, I wouldn't say Jesus excessively.

It's fairly wild there, Marcus.

Yeah, mine's pretty loose.

And grey on one side and not on the other.

So I think I think.

You know, you're not dying it.

You're not.

No, no, no, no, no, not yet.

That's coming.

But I think the left side of my face may be travelling more slowly, no, more quickly through time

than the right side of my face and is therefore aging faster.

That's an excellent theory, by the way.

And I do, I imagine

your tenth will be in the healing field.

So, why is this side of my face so young?

And you'll have your beach ball stool.

So, we're just about to run out of time, actually.

To begin to sum up, then, Faye, where do you see this subject, this attempt to bring quantum theory and relativity together, quantum cosmology, where do you see it going in the next few years?

Are you optimistic?

I'm very optimistic.

I think that, to answer an earlier question, the history of science has shown that every time we've been bold and have tried to understand something, then we've been successful.

I mean, it's amazing what we have achieved in some tiny fraction of the history of the entire universe.

So the human race has only existed for a mere fraction of the age of the universe.

And we understand so much about the universe and our place in it.

It's really thrilling and totally inspiring what we have managed to do so far.

And that

I take great

confidence and heart from that.

And I think that there's nothing we can't understand if we want to, if we try to.

And I believe that these ideas will be fruitful.

But they've got to be tested.

It's got to have

make predictions for things that we'll see when we look out and measure light from

distant objects in the universe.

It's got to have consequences for observation so we can test these ideas.

Marcus, do you feel that after this 27 minutes you now have a great grasping of quantum cosmology?

Define a great grasp, Robin.

Can you narrow that down to a quantum amount that around a campfire tonight at 4 a.m.

you will be able to make people believe that you understand the work both of Einstein and beyond?

I'll tell you what, Robin, I don't think I will, but I think another me will.

And Katie, final question for you, which is if we look at the many worlds interpretation, what is the perfect world for you in all of those different ones they split up?

Oh my, I would say 1973 watching Led Zeppelin.

For this?

So we're going to end on a song because we should explain right at the beginning, we mentioned that Katie Tunsell only had at home there was one album, and it was now by Tom Leara, who is an incredible song, still alive today, though he hasn't recorded for many years, a great satirical writer and a great writer on science as well.

And we decided that we would attempt possibly the worst sing-along of all time, one of the most complex pieces.

Basically, it's a song called The Elements, and we're going to see what happens in this world when 3,000 tired and confused people attempt in approximately two and a half minutes to sing a song which includes all the elements.

I'm very pleased to say that we have to help us do this someone who is currently appearing at the festival.

He is appearing with four puss and a piano.

Please welcome the stage, Roland Anderson!

Come on, Brian, you lead the way.

You have a grand musical tradition.

There's antinomy, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hydrogen, and oxygen, and nitrogen, and helium, and nickel, diamondium, neptunium, germanium, and iron, and masium, ruthenium, uranium,

Europium, circuitum, lutetium, vanadium, and lanthanum, and osmium, and astatine, and radium, and gold and protactylium, and indium, and gallium, and iodine, and thorium, and thulium, and thallium.

There's easier xenium, actinium, bedium, or padolinium,

and lithium, and strontium and silicon, and silver, and samarium.

And this is where we lithium, verylium, vaparium.

There's homey, yummy, healy, yummin, hafni, yumm and derby, yummy, foster, fancy, yummy, flowereal, and turbian, and Maganese, mercenary, and petty and medesium, is pretty of a scatty, yummy, terrible, and till, and left the twin, yummy, fatty, and turbulent.

A terrible,

a tanner and taking to a tiny and dirty, and county and tassy and curry and today.

There's someone

about the baby,

Cornelier

Samuel

And then

if you've enjoyed this program, you might like to try other Radio 4 podcasts, including Start the Week, Lively Discussions chaired by Andrew Marr, and a weekly highlight from Radio 4's evening arts program Front Row.

To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio 4.

With the Wealth Front Cash Account, you can earn 4% annual percentage yield from partner banks on your cash until you're ready to invest.

The cash account grows your money with no account maintenance fees and free instant withdrawals whenever you need it.

Money works better here.

Go to WealthFront.com to start saving and investing today.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC member FINRA SIPC.

Wealthfront is not a bank.

The APY on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024 is represented as subject to change and requires no minimum.

Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY.